Theimagery for this etching is based on Walton Ford’s monumental watercolor painting entitled GRRR!, 2012, to celebrate the legendary 50 year career of the Rolling Stones. Inspired by his monumental watercolor portraits of King Kong from his 2011 exhibition I don’t like to look at him, Jack. It makes me think of that awful day on the Island at Paul Kasmin Gallery, Ford conceived the idea of incorporating the iconic Rolling Stones lips to capture the rebellious spirit of one of the world’s greatest rock bands.

Like all of Walton Ford's masterfully executed prints, the limited edition MCMLXII-MMXII etching is meticulously drawn and painted by the artist. Ford's conscientious hand etching method adds richness and complexity to the composition. Breaking an image down into separate colors fields, Ford envisions the precise color combination. He alters and tweaks the etchings to create different effects including burnishing certain areas in the plate through Old Master printing techniques. The painstaking process of inking each of the five plates by hand, one after the other and printing each at the same time are executed to flawlessly achieve detailed tonal and pigment shifts. The etchings are printed at Wingate Studio in New Hampshire.

About the Artist

Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, New York in 1960, and currently lives and works in New York, NY. His monumental watercolors expand the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting, meditation on the often violent and bizarre moments at the intersection of human culture and the natural world. Although human figures rarely appear in his paintings, their presence is always implied. Ford’s work is included in a number of private and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A survey of Ford’s work was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida in 2007. In 2010-2011, Ford’s midcareer retrospective traveled from the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Fur Gegenwart in Berlin, to the Albertina in Vienna and to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Taschen books has issued three editions of his large-format monograph, Pancha Tantra.